


The Education of a Magician

by regshoe



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: 1990s, Gen, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:41:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28074885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regshoe/pseuds/regshoe
Summary: York, 1997. A schoolteacher reads a peculiar essay on the history of Faerie.
Comments: 28
Kudos: 37
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Education of a Magician

**Author's Note:**

  * For [attheborder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/gifts).



> I love exploring the world of _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_, and as soon as I saw this prompt I decided I had to write something for it. I hope you enjoy the result :)
> 
> Thanks very much to ianthebroome for beta reading!

_'That's a very good question, and I'm proud to say it's something I've always been passionate about. York has a rich magical heritage, as, of course, does all of Northern England, and I do believe that a partial transfer of power to Newcastle would—'_

Catherine Shipton flicked the switch on the radio, cutting off the Labour candidate for the City of York. Not that she had been paying much attention, anyway—she had only put the radio on for some background noise while she ate her solitary tea of shepherd's pie and carrot cake. It was April 1997, campaigning was in full swing, and the pivotal question of the election was of unique significance to her home city; but Catherine intended to vote for solid, practical reasons—education, housing, social policy: things really important to her own life, and those of the children she taught—not for some wild dream about restoring the Raven King's lands to their medieval glory. (The advocates of Northern English devolution—nicknamed the Johannite Party by their detractors, though they did not take this as much of an insult—would not have agreed with this characterisation, however.)

The silenced radio stood on a bare, polished wooden table at one side of the small dining room. Bookshelves lined two of the other walls. The window above the table looked out over a tiny square of garden, and beyond it to the mild, light evening casting its glow over the jumbled red-brick walls and tiled roofs of this quiet street in the northern suburbs of York. Catherine had cycled home from school earlier that afternoon through a torrential April shower, which already seemed to have had its proverbial effect on the daisies that dotted the lawn and the flowerbeds and lilac bushes surrounding it.

The washing-up done, she sat down again at the table with a folder containing the homework handed in that day by her Year 10 English Magic class. The question she had set presented them with an excerpt from a letter written by John Segundus to his friend John Childermass in 1827, describing one of his visits into Faerie. They were to discuss, with reference to their own knowledge, what the letter revealed about the development of theories of Faerie in the nineteenth century.

The first couple of essays were solidly competent. They made all the usual points: how Segundus's remarks on his surroundings illustrated his Strangite views, while anticipating the later development of the blended Strangite-Norrellite characterisation of Faerie; how his observations sometimes resembled medieval descriptions of Faerie, but also brought in original matter which would influence the Victorian 'flower garden' view of fairies and their kingdoms. Catherine was pleased: her pupils knew their material well.

And then she came to the essay written by Jessica Dent. Jessica's teacher sighed as she recognised her handwriting and saw how many pages she had managed to cover. She began to read.

_Segundus's description of Faerie provides an example of some odd contradictions which are seen in many descriptions from different sources. He mentions how the architecture of the fairy palace contains medieval Gothic features like spires, pointed arches and bar-tracery, but parts of it also look like more 'modern' early nineteenth-century buildings, and there are other features he doesn't recognise at all. Likewise, he describes the plants and flowers as a mixture of English, foreign and unfamiliar. He thinks this is because fairies are inconsistent in nature, or because the appearance of the palace and its garden changes by magic as he passes through, but actually it indicates that these are different places..._

Jessica was a very bright child, and could be immensely frustrating to teach in the way that very bright children often were. She wasn't the sort to ask cheeky questions or mess about in class, thankfully, or to slack off in her work because she was clever enough to find it dull. No, with her it was rather the opposite: she made sure she never found anything dull, by doing far too much.

_We can see here the development of English magicians' awareness that 'Faerie' is not just one place, but many places (Segundus says ' these kingdoms through which I have travelled', but also says that he has only been away two days—not long enough to travel through many kingdoms if he was travelling normally over distance!). He doesn't mean there are many kingdoms in Faerie the same way there are many countries on Earth. There are 'worlds upon worlds within Faerie' (Sutherland, 1985), and when magicians like Segundus travel in Faerie they see all those worlds at the same time—because they know how to look for them._

Last year Jessica had gone through a phase of being quite in love with John Segundus. She had read all his writings, and all the biographies, and had won the school's local history prize with a formidably researched project on Segundus's life and achievements in York. It was not surprising that she had taken this question as an opportunity. The record of Jessica's English Magic homework over the last few years was a catalogue of her obsessions: the King's Roads; Maria Absalom and the Shadow House; early modern Scottish magic; John Segundus; and now, evidently, this idea of there being many worlds within Faerie. The reference (which was badly formatted, but not so badly that Catherine couldn't identify the book) was to one of the early works of James Sutherland. Catherine had it on her shelves; she found it and looked up the passage in question. Yes, Sutherland had discussed the 'Faerie as many worlds in one' view—an obscure, if not actually fringe, position ten or fifteen years ago, and, as Catherine understood, not much discussed these days. According to Sutherland its advocates had taken their speculation too far, and badly misinterpreted concepts from quantum physics to support their ideas, and from here their writings had been largely discredited. But Jessica, apparently, thought they had never gone far enough.

_This explains all the stories (e.g. about Anne Bloodworth (Pale, quoted in Sutherland, 1985), or the three milkmaids of Sedbergh (Grayrigg, 1887)) where people who wander into Faerie pass hundreds of years in what seems to them like a few hours or days. What happens is they get stuck in many different Faerie worlds at the same time, and so they experience the same day thousands of times over, all at once. When they return to our world, these days collapse on top of each other and become many years. Magicians like Segundus, because of their magical sensitivity and knowledge, know how to stay in one place—so this does not happen, and Segundus returned within two days. But magicians can still see the traces of many Faerie worlds around them, and Segundus's observations in this letter show the beginnings of this idea in the development of theories about the true nature of Faerie._

Catherine frowned. She had never heard of this before. She flipped through a few more pages of Sutherland, but he made no mention of this elaboration of the 'many worlds' theory. Perhaps it was Jessica's own original speculation—she was quite capable of it—or perhaps she had absorbed it somewhere else in her extensive reading. Jessica devoured all sorts of books and articles upon magic and magical history, some of them very obscure indeed; she was well-known to the staff at York Central Library. She had confided in Catherine, a few months ago, about her ambition to study magical history at Durham, and she had already made a good start on the sort of record that would get her a place there—but she must improve her academic work, of course... Catherine looked forward to seeing what they made of her, if she managed it.

_This must be the correct theory, however, because I have been to Faerie and seen it for myself._

At this Catherine had to stop reading for a moment; but, really, she was not as shocked as she might have been. She had no doubt that Jessica was telling the truth. She was talented at practical magic; she had easily mastered the basic spells which were all that was seen fit to teach in state schools, and Catherine was aware that she had been making her own extracurricular experiments for some time. And of course she would have no thought of a scruple in admitting it to her teacher (Jessica was very decided in her opinions; she thought, for instance, that fifteen-year-olds should have the vote, so that she would be able to vote for Northern English independence as soon as the opportunity arose). 

_(In fact Segundus (1820) advises magicians to go to Faerie themselves, saying 'first-hand experience of the Other Lands is an invaluable aid in gaining real knowledge of the nature of magic'—so I decided to try his advice). I followed the fairy road that leads along the northern edge of Strensall Common. Like Segundus I saw many signs that what looked like one world was actually many worlds, all in one place. I also did not come back after a hundred years, because I knew what I was looking for._

Catherine recognised this quotation without needing to look it up. It was from Segundus's _Life of Jonathan Strange_ , and, if she remembered correctly, continued: ' _though the very real and substantial perils of such an adventure must not be underestimated, and it should not be undertaken without thorough preparation._ ' 

She really ought to discourage Jessica from this sort of thing. Venturing into at least the nearer parts of Faerie was not so perilous nowadays as it had been in the time of Anne Bloodworth or the Sedbergh milkmaids, but it was hardly safe. Indeed, she had warned Jessica's parents about it, though with little apparent effect on the girl herself.

Jessica spent a few more paragraphs explaining her theory, then switched abruptly to some further analysis of Segundus's observations on the flora of Faerie. The essay came to an end without any attempt at a concluding paragraph.

It was growing dark outside. Catherine got up and switched on the light, pacing round the room for a minute or two before returning to her seat, thinking out what she should do now. Of course it was a dreadful essay. Jessica veered at random between topics and had made only a cursory attempt to answer the question set, and compared strictly against the mark scheme it would do very badly indeed. But Catherine could not quite bear to give ideas like this no credit at all—they were rather brilliant in their way...

She had not yet closed the curtains, and as she sat gazing vaguely out of the window her own reflection was superimposed on the grey dusk that had fallen over the garden, dulling the colours of the spring flowers. Whether Jessica's ideas about many worlds in Faerie actually had any merit she did not know, though she very much doubted it; but such exuberant speculation in strange ideas about Faerie had a merit of its own. It took Catherine back to her own schooldays. She remembered, with sudden clarity, the November afternoon when she had discovered Violet Grayrigg's _Westmorland Magical Tales_ on a back shelf of the school library, and had missed an English lesson and her bus home in her absorption in the book... She understood why Jessica wrote the way she did. Anyone just taking in ideas like that, and taking them seriously, would end up with thoughts all over the place. How else could you begin to comprehend the vastness of it all?

By the standards of a GCSE mark scheme Jessica would never do, but she understood the subject in a far more fundamental way than that.

...She ought to stop wandering off like this, and she also needed to draw the curtains. She rose to her feet to do so, pausing to look out of the window again just for a moment. The sky, clear now after the day's showers, was a deep evening blue fading to pale gold in the west, and the lilac bushes and the brick walls of the neighbours' houses had drawn their shadows over flowerbeds, lawn and paving stones. A blackbird took flight across the garden, chattering its alarm-call through the still air.

You could remember, after all, that this was John Uskglass's country. Suburban housing estates, the new shopping centre they were building at Monks Cross, the ring road, the grand Victorian railway station in the city centre, office blocks, comprehensive schools—all these things stood on the same ground where once the Raven King's wild company had ridden, where any lane might lead to Faerie or the King's Roads or a thousand other more mysterious places, where a shadowy figure upon a shadowed throne waited at the back of every darkness... At the centre of the whirl of ideas, speculation and imagination produced by a mind like Jessica Dent's, Catherine could believe that they did so still.

She closed the curtains, sat down at the table, picked up her red pen and drew Jessica's essay towards her.

**Author's Note:**

> Durham is, of course, the first university in England for magical studies—having a geographical advantage over both Oxford and Cambridge in this particular area.


End file.
